Depending on whom you talk to, John Cage - whose centennial is being celebrated throughout the musical world this year - was a visionary or a fraud, a toweringly important composer or a thinker whose insights have essentially little to do with music.

Those disagreements aren't going to be resolved anytime soon, but Thursday's rewarding concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players dodged controversy by focusing on a part of Cage's legacy whose greatness is not remotely in doubt: the three "Constructions" for percussion that he wrote between 1939 and 1941.

It's hard now, so many decades after the fact, to recapture the dislocating audacity of these essays in pure rhythmic process, which go further by dabbling in an array of unorthodox sounds. In the "First Construction," elaborately structured rhythmic patterns are punctuated by the thunderous rattle of industrial sheet metal; elsewhere, Cage throws into the mix tin cans, a log drum and a large conch shell.

All of these resources support a rhythmic language that is equally diverse, ranging from a wholly abstract landscape that is one of the most overt reminiscences of Cage's youthful studies with Arnold Schoenberg to jazz- and Latin-tinged dance explosions.

Thursday's performances at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum were as vivid and infectious as anyone could ask. Artistic Director Steven Schick - who comes to the post from his day gig as one of the most powerfully virtuosic new-music percussionists of our time - led cadres of players (six in the "First Construction," four in each of the others) through renditions that were by turns conscientiously precise and exuberantly free.

The rest of the program was devoted to three recent chamber pieces by young composers, beginning most enticingly with Missy Mazzoli's sextet "Still Life With Avalanche."

The title suggests the struggle that is at the heart of this brief but evocative score. It begins with slow, mysterious chords sustained by the two string instruments and a pair of harmonicas - as though the entire ensemble were a breathing body - only to have that stasis fractured by increasingly boisterous bursts of melody from the piano and bass clarinet. Soon the energy becomes irresistible, and the piece turns into a joyous, though still haunted, dance.

Lei Liang's sextet "Aural Hypothesis" consists of a ghostly landscape of vaporous gestures - scraped violin notes, ominous tinklings from inside the piano - that keep threatening to turn into something more. I was smitten by the beauty of most of it, but as the piece wore on I became increasingly eager for something to actually happen.

That desire was filled to a fault in Samuel Carl Adams' dense and hyperactive Piano Trio. For 15 minutes, the three instruments keep up their busy schedule, banging into one another in a stream of breathless rhythms and harmonies whose logic eluded me.